Marcia Talley - Daughter of Ashes

He laid a gnarled hand on her arm. ‘It’s OK, Bernie. It was a long time ago, and Marilyn’s been gone for years. She won’t mind. Tell her.’

Bernadette leaned forward and spoke quietly. ‘The school secretary, Marilyn Daniels, was one of our parishioners. She figured out what we were doing and confronted me about it after church one day. I panicked!’ She pressed a hand to her chest. ‘But you know what? She understood. Completely. And she made the whole transcript problem go away. It simply vanished – poof! We never heard one more word about Miss Nancy Hazlett’s school records from Chicago, and nobody ever suspected she was passing for white.

‘And then, just before Nancy’s senior year, we left for the mission station in Angola,’ she said.

‘Bernie wanted to take Nancy with us,’ Ronald said, ‘but Nancy and I talked her out of it. Nancy planned to finish her senior year and apply for a music scholarship at Peabody in Baltimore, and Marilyn convinced me her chances of that were slim to none if she missed out on her last year of high school.’

‘But if Nancy was pregnant…’ Bernadette choked on the word.

‘Did Nancy have any boyfriends?’ I asked as gently as I could.

‘She had lots of friends,’ Ronald said, ‘but I don’t remember any one in particular.’

Bernadette tapped her temple with an index finger. ‘At our age, the hard drive is pretty full. If I could just get rid of all those advertising jingles from the fifties, or reruns of I Love Lucy , I’d be able to store more information up here.’

‘Nancy was a popular girl,’ Ronald said. ‘Until she got her driver’s license it seemed I was always picking her up after one extra-curricular event or another.’

‘Oh, why didn’t she confide in us?’ Bernadette wailed. ‘We could have helped !’ She jumped up, threw open the screen door and disappeared into the house.

‘Bernie has always blamed herself for Nancy’s suicide,’ Ronald said softly once his wife was out of earshot.

Feeling like a voyeur, I stood. ‘I’m sorry. Maybe I’d better go.’

‘No, stay. Please. A nice long cry will do Bernie good. It’s been sixty years in coming.’

‘Did Nancy continue to live here while you were in Angola?’ I asked once I’d retaken my seat.

‘Oh, no. There was an interim pastor, a single man. Nancy convinced us that she could manage on her own at the farm and we’d given her our car to drive, of course. She was almost eighteen, after all, and very mature for her age.’

‘Her brother showed me a photograph, and I’d have to agree.’

‘Ah, yes, poor Thomas, coming home to…’ He paused. ‘Well, to nothing. Three years in a prisoner of war camp can mess with your mind, then to lose your mother, your sister and the family farm all in one fell swoop the minute you step off the plane.’

I shuddered.

‘It doesn’t bear thinking about.’

‘Cap, uh, Thomas mentioned a wife.’

‘Tanya. A real prize, that woman. Thomas got himself a job at Clifton Farms and Tanya worked in the office there. Came into his life at just the right time, Tanya did. Gave him the stability he needed.’

‘Did they have any children?’

Ronald shook his head. ‘Some medical issue, I understand. Sadly, Tanya’s been gone for a couple of years now, but we’re all getting old. Some days I wonder how I can keep putting one foot in front of the other,’ he chuckled. ‘Use it or lose it, as they say.’

Me, too , I thought. We seemed to be straying off target, though, so I guided him back as gently as I could by asking, ‘How did you find out about Nancy’s death?’

Ronald sighed heavily. ‘We wrote to Nancy every week. At first, we’d hear back, but after three months her letters stopped coming. We didn’t worry at first. I thought it was just the usual difficulty with getting mail delivered in a third world country. But when I finally got to a telephone and was able to reach Marilyn…’ His voice trailed off. ‘Oh, we simply couldn’t believe it! Suicide! No way. Not our Nancy.’

‘Passing must have taken a toll on her,’ I suggested kindly. ‘Always looking over her shoulder, always afraid that someone would find out she was black. How she must have longed to be white.’

‘Oh, no, you don’t understand at all, Mrs Ives. Nancy didn’t want to be white. Nancy just wanted to be free.’

‘Those who have been once intoxicated with power, and have derived any kind of emolument from it, even though but for one year, can never willingly abandon it.’

Edmund Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, 1791

Kim and I were sitting in her office, drinking coffee out of proper cups and saucers, discussing my findings in the library and what I’d learned from my visit with the Nightingales when there was a knock on the door behind me. Before Kim could rest her cup in its saucer, the door swung open and Clifton Ames eased into the room, his signature cigarillo clamped between his teeth.

The tip glowed red as he sucked air through the roll of noxious weed. When he removed it from between his lips long enough to say, ‘Good morning, ladies, I hope I’m not interrupting anything,’ gray smoke curled toward the ceiling.

Kim wrinkled her nose.

I made a production of fanning smoke away from my face.

‘You can’t smoke in here, Mr Ames,’ Kim told the Chicken à la King.

‘Oh, yeah. Sorry.’ He waved the cigarillo around a bit helplessly. ‘Ashtray?’

Kim snatched the saucer from under her cup and pushed it across the desk.

Ames snubbed the offending cigarillo out, then grabbed a straight-back chair from the corner, dragged it over next to mine and sat down in it. ‘Mrs Ives.’

I was impressed that he remembered my name. It had been several weeks since Kendall’s party.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Ames?’ Kim wanted to know.

‘I’ll get right to the point,’ he said. ‘I was talking to Fran Lawson at Kendall’s shindig a while back and she told me about the work the historical society is doing in the basement here. Now that Kendall’s gone, I’m wondering if you need someone to pick up the tab on the office space, the computers and such.’

I’d been wondering about that, too, and it was, in fact, one of the questions I had for Kim on my list, so I was relieved when she replied, ‘I think we’re in good shape there, Mr Ames. Fortunately, Kendall paid the rental on everything in advance, so we’re good for another three months at least. After that…’ She shrugged. ‘Perhaps after that I’ll give you a call. It’s thoughtful of you to volunteer.’

Ames rubbed his lower lip, seemingly uncomfortable without his familiar cigar. ‘What you got down there anyway?’

Kim smiled warily. ‘We’re not exactly sure. That’s where Fran Lawson and Hannah here come in. It’s our very good fortune that they live in Tilghman County and that they’re both trained records managers.’

‘We’re making a complete inventory, Mr Ames,’ I explained. ‘Once we know exactly what we have we’ll share the list with the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis. Some of the material will undoubtedly be transferred directly to them. The rest? Well, we’ll see.’

‘According to the records retention schedule established by Maryland law,’ Kim added, ‘most of what we found belonged to various county offices and could have been discarded in the 1960s and 70s.’

‘Why didn’t they? Destroy them, that is?’

Kim twirled a pencil between her fingers, as if considering how to answer his question. ‘In 1975, the courthouse was extensively renovated. The funds became available rather suddenly – end of year money, I suppose – so everyone had to hustle to clear out their offices before the painters arrived. They needed a convenient place to store their files temporarily, so they moved them into the basement. But after the painters left, the records never went back.’